Two weeks notice: your business model is wrong

How is it Friday already? I have just one week left at my regular job. In addition to looking at documentation, I talked on a video call with the lead engineer who will take over a couple of my projects. We went over my current bug list (exactly 13 lucky tickets in Jira) and reviewed a few of the trickier outstanding issues.

Nothing like walking through old code, even at a high level, to discover so much outdated cruft that could be redesigned or cleared out. There’s always a little bit of regret: if only I had fixed this one last problem before leaving, or smoothed over this one confusing part of the web UI. But that’s a slippery slope that could go on indefinitely. Web software in particular is evolving and never fully complete.

Meanwhile, I continue to get great feedback on my new Riverfold project from the very early beta testers. Bug reports, new ideas, and sometimes a series of questions that basically ends up as: you’re charging the wrong users, what if you tried this completely different way to make money instead?

While I don’t think there’s any direct competition for what I’m building, there are a lot of related services. I’d count even parts of Tumblr and WordPress among the services that are both complementary and in a similar theme to what I want to do. Tumblr makes money primarily through ads. WordPress has ads but (I expect) makes more money through their upgrades: paid custom domains, VaultPress backup, and premium themes.

When choosing a business model for my app, I’ve also been inspired by GitHub’s simplicity. Free for open source projects, which allows you to get a feel for how the entire system works as long as you don’t need private repositories. Paid for organizations, scaling up based on how many projects you have. The success of my project will hang on whether I can mix some of all these models without confusing potential new customers.